Critical SaaS and Web Apps Make Your Business Vulnerable. Here’s How We Solved That Problem.

SaaS and corporate web apps present challenges to the enterprise many have not considered. The process of signing up and migrating critical business operations to the cloud is fast, easy and can add remarkable value, but comes with a tradeoff that’s not always obvious. These apps can increase an organization’s vulnerability to cybersecurity risk. Due to the nature of the web and traditional web clients (browsers), there is simply not an adequate level of data protection or governance.

Given the massive adoption of SaaS and web apps, this presents an urgent problem. Organizations are operating with thousands of apps, sanctioned and unsanctioned, and often have thousands of employees across myriad departments with their own needs. The need to create constant exceptions to give workers what they require creates massive complexity, along with equally massive risk.

In other words, the present situation is a colossal headache for IT departments.

Here’s the good news: we’ve solved this problem by creating an innovative new product category: the world’s first Enterprise Browser.

A Simple, Elegant Solution for Data Protection and Governance

The web browser is now an integral part of the business technology landscape. Yet they were never meant to be enterprise tools. Conventional browsers may work beautifully, but they are a consumer product at core.

Pressing a consumer-grade tool into enterprise service comes with a slew of security complications. You can’t see how users interact with data within a browser. They can print screens, copy and paste data, take screen snapshots–a full range of potentially compromising actions for which organizations had minimal visibility.

There have been attempts to address this problem by bolting on tools such as web gateways and Cloud Access Security Brokers (CASBs). These approaches have always failed because these tools are cumbersome and do not offer fine-grained control, creating an ongoing governance mess.

These failures led us to pose a fundamental question: what if we approached this problem of control and governance directly in the browser?

Marrying Enterprise-Grade Security with Consumer-Grade Usability and Performance

Role-Based Access Controls (RBAC) associated with some apps provide a level of control, but they can’t do the one thing that enables effective governance: assert control over the right app, at the right time, for the right user.

An Enterprise Browser can do this by checking device posture during user logins to ensure trusted devices are being used to access critical SaaS apps. An Enterprise Browser allows you to create policies to block things like screen printing, cut & paste into non-approved destinations, or sharing information over web conferencing.

Additionally, you can use an Enterprise Browser to redact sensitive data types within applications via browser-based Robotic Process Automation (RPA) or enable deep audit logging to see every action a user has taken. An Enterprise Browser can also encrypt cookies to protect app sessions from intrusion, scan for malware, or create policies governing data storage and enhance privacy.

This gives you everything you need to make data protection and governance headaches a thing of the past.

While SaaS and Web apps have seen extraordinary adoption and delivered numerous benefits, cyber-risk and unstructured governance have hitched along for the ride. Creation of the enterprise browser is the breakthrough that IT departments urgently need to solve this long standing problem.

For a more in depth article on protecting critical SaaS and web apps using an enterprise browser, click here.